Category: Mental Health

Dissociative Identity Disorder looks like a psychosis to people who don’t understand it or who think that all people with DID act like SybilorNorman Bates.

Yes, I hear the voices of my alternates, but those voices are not hallucinations; they are more like thoughts in another person’s voice.

Each alternate has its own memories and skills.

Bobby is 16, he holds ‘faith’.

Some alternates communicate autonomously with each other while
others remain in hiding.

There are memory boundaries between alternates but over time
these boundaries became more permeable.

“Dissociative identities exist in a third reality, an inner world that is visualized, heard, felt and experienced as real. This third reality is often characterized by trance logic. In trance logic, ideas and relationships of ideas about things are not subject to the rules of normal logic. Because (the alternates) are kept in separate compartments (of the brain), contradictory beliefs and ideas can exist together; they do not have to make sense. In the way, the internal world has many alternate selves that experience themselves as separate people. There is a pseudo delusional sense of separateness and independence.”

Robert Goldstein wrote a blog about recognizing himself. If you aren’t following him I highly recommend it. He is very talented and wise.

I was thinking about his post as I was on my walk today taking pictures of randomness that caught my eye and allowed me to be mindful. A piece of grass still alive in an entire yard that was dead, a tree stump with one leaf and one acorn, a piece of fern coming back to live when everything around it had been frozen in the latest freeze, a camellia bush that was entirely red and one that is just like my 14 year old but at least 10 times it’s size, and a few feathers that I consider a reward for my picking up a few sticks in my yard.

As I looked at these photos on my camera they looked exactly as I saw them…

Earlier this week I found out someone who I had grown up with but had lost touch many years ago had taken his own life. Yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of an amazing human, someone who taught me more than they will ever know, taking their life. In the summer of 2015 I lost one of my dearest and best friends, in the same way, and she will never know that my life will never be the same without her.

This is a subject I have always planned to write about, because as many people who have followed my writing over the years will know, putting some words down and emptying the thoughts in my brain is a kind of personal therapy for me. But on this subject, I have always refrained as I know how deeply and how directly it affects so many of my loved ones.